This is the biggest one yet. Microsoft's professional extortion campaign - the third side of the same triangle it shares with Apple and Oracle - has finally hit Samsung. The two companies have signed a patent licensing agreement concerning Samsung's use of Android, in which a rumoured fee of $15 (!) per device will flow from Seoul to Redmond. Not entirely coincidentally, that's about the price of a Windows Phone 7 license.

It's a business decision, if paying protection rackets costs less than fighting them then the company pays.

the problem is that it ligitimizes the protection racket with yet another example the the raketeer can point to as evidence that future "customers" should pay up. (Your neibour the butcher shop thought we where worth paying, you should too.. notice how the shop hasn't had a fire or broken windows since becoming a our customer?)

In more modern terms, it provides case law that strengthens the raketeer's posission in future litigation. It doesn't have to be right, it just has to have happened a bunch of times already.